Preface

Franklin Pierce was arguably the most handsome man ever to serve as president of the United States. He was certainly one of the most amiable and congenial men to hold that office. Because of his popularity, personal charm, and family lineage, he enjoyed a meteoric political career in New Hampshire. Still in his twenties, he was elected four consecutive years to the state house of representatives, and in the final two of those terms his admiring colleagues chose him as Speaker. New Hampshire’s voters sent him to the national House of Representatives in 1833 and again in 1835, and in 1837, prior to his thirty-third birthday, the state legislature put him in the U.S. Senate, from which he resigned in early 1842. As a brigadier general commanding volunteer regiments raised in New England, he earned a commendable, if not quite glorious, record in the Mexican-American War. Democrats nominated him for president in 1852 in order to break a deadlock at their national convention, and in November, a few days before his forty-eighth birthday, he carried twenty-seven of thirty-one states to become the youngest man yet elected to the White House.

Pierce’s career had been marred by personal tragedy. Two of his sons had died before reaching the age of five, and shortly before he left New Hampshire for his inauguration in Washington, D.C., the last of his young sons was killed in a train accident. His painfully shy and often morose wife, who hated politics and life in Washington, grew to be more a source of concern than of solace.

During his term in the White House, Pierce could have used a helpmeet. Historians, indeed, usually rank Pierce among the six or eight worst presidents the country has ever had. Two things primarily account for that negative judgment. A passionately committed Democratic Party loyalist, Pierce during his presidency managed to divide his party into fiercely warring factional camps. More important, he helped propel the nation down the road to the Civil War. As a result, Democrats suffered monumental defeats in the off-year congressional elections of 1854—55 and were reduced to a minority of the national electorate, a status they would suffer until the mid-1870s. Also as a result, Pierce was the only president in the nineteenth century who sought, but was denied, renomination by his beloved party.

Various explanations have been offered for this sorry record. Some attribute it to personal mistakes in judgment and a lack of farsighted statesmanship on Pierce’s part. Others portray Pierce, for all his amiability, as a fundamentally weak man who craved the approval of his peers and who deferred to stronger personalities in his cabinet and party. Still others cite external forces over which he had no control and which overwhelmed his presidency. As I hope to show in the following brief biography, all three factors played a role in wrecking what had once been a dazzlingly successful political career.

I argue here, however, that the primary factor bringing Pierce to grief was his obsession with preserving the unity of the Democratic Party. Almost every previous biographer and historian who has studied Pierce has noted that deep commitment, but none has successfully explained what caused it. I contend that it derived from Pierce’s understanding of the political situation in which he usually found himself, namely the lopsided dominance of his own Democratic Party vis-à-vis its partisan foes. Starting in the 1820s, newspaper editors affiliated with New York’s Martin Van Buren astutely outlined the danger to any party’s internal cohesion that a weak external opposition poses. Any party may “suffer temporary defeats,” those editors wrote, but “it is certain to acquire additional strength by the attacks of adverse parties.” A party is “most in jeopardy when an opposition is not sufficiently defined.” Or again, during the contest between Jeffersonians and Federalists, “each found in the strength of the other a powerful motive of union and vigor.” In sum, the internal unity of any party depends on the robustness, the closeness, of interparty competition. The weaker that external competition, the greater is the danger of internal fragmentation within the dominant party.

Pierce was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine when these newspaper editorials appeared in Albany, New York, and I have no evidence that he read them. Nonetheless, a private letter Pierce wrote to a friend in the mid-1820s about the necessity of political parties and interparty competition in any republic suggests that in fact he did. In any event, he acted throughout his political career as though he had read them. His Democratic Party was overwhelmingly dominant in New Hampshire from the early 1830s until the early 1850s and in the nation as a whole, if only temporarily, from the fall of 1851 until the fall of 1854. That dominance, and the threat it posed to internal Democratic unity, primarily, if not exclusively, accounts for Franklin Pierce’s most fateful political decisions as the country faced the ever-growing prospect of civil war.

In closing I want to thank Robin Dennis and Sean Wilentz for their editorial help in preparing this book.